


holding my childhood to ransom

by ennaih (aquandrian)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Drabbles, Gen, Headcanon, animal cruelty, even as i wrote them, hints of sexual violence, lots of death, non-canonical death, things that scared the hell out of me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 08:48:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7501842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/ennaih
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I asked myself what child Krennic was like.</p><p>And the answer scared the hell out of me. Sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	holding my childhood to ransom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bam_cassiopeia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bam_cassiopeia/gifts).



> Title from _Do You Love Me (Part 2)_ by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

Orson Krennic was a small slender boy with big eyes, quiet and oddly serious. People assumed this hid a shy sweet nature right until the day he was found pulling the limbs off small creatures in the back garden. 

His parents didn’t know what to do with him. They lived on an Outer Rim planet, in a small peaceful village that was almost bucolic. His mother was a librarian, sweet and a little anxious, very clever and lacking all confidence in her ability. She read to him and taught him a love of Old Republic literature, showed him how to care for books. But really she was always a little scared of him, unequipped to deal with his grave manner and his occasional awkward attempts to show her love. Once he made her a bit of lace. He studied books and holovids, practised for months and then presented it to her on a birthday. She kept it amongst her most treasured possessions and only wore it once, the day he graduated. He noticed but they never spoke about it.

His father was a clerk in a local government office who never proceeded further in his career. He had no natural intelligence, lacked all ambition, having found his niche and never moving from it. They barely interacted though they lived in the same house for most of Orson’s formative years, often sat in the same room without talking, reading to themselves and thinking their own thoughts. If his father was ever proud of him, Orson was never told – maybe out of fear? – and very soon this consideration became immaterial.

When Orson was seven, he decided he wanted to join the Army. His parents agreed and sent him off to the Academy, relieved and hoping that perhaps the training there would rid of him of those terrifying incidents of bloodlust.

As you would expect, Orson had almost no friends through his childhood and schooling. There was a girl once who shared his love of reading, and he brought her over one day to show her his mother’s collection of Old Republic literature. After they examined the bindings and illustrations and art, he read to her. The girl fled the house and never returned. The book was the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. Orson was eleven.

At the Academy, he made two male friends. Both came from Coruscant aristocracy, white and entitled. Within a month, Orson had lost his Outer Rim accent and spoke like cut glass. He was known to be uncommonly skilled with Old Republic weapons, particularly favouring swordplay. This made him a favourite of certain nostalgic commanders, admitted into their private clubs where he learnt the intricacies of political machinations and how to navigate the old boys clubs of white male human ambition. 

If he had love affairs or sexual encounters, these were conducted far from Academy environs. And if a prostitute was found dead in some backwater town, she or he or ze was discovered weeks and sometimes months after people had forgotten the quiet serious young man with blue grey eyes and slightly cruel mouth. He was neither a bully nor a protector of smaller boys. His focus was on the faculty and the officer ranks, who could make him a better person and get him where he wanted to go. No one knew where this was. 

In his final year, one of his two male friends died in a freak accident at training. A few months later, the other hung himself. There were the usual rumours about homosexual love thwarted and grief at being left behind. These were never substantiated. 

Orson Krennic graduated from the Academy with special honours and immediately passed into the bureaucracy of the Imperial Army. He never saw his parents again. The Outer Rim planet he came from was ravaged by a plague and each village incinerated for its own good. The Director of the Imperial Army showed no reaction when he was told. There is no record as to who gave the orders.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know, man.


End file.
